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May is upon us: another academic year comes has come to an end at Indiana University. At the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center, too, another successful semester and year has now been completed. Leading up to its coming fiftieth anniversary (2012-2013), the IAUNRC has been hard at work in the past months improving its resource offerings, revamping its outreach efforts, and staying on the cutting edge of Eurasian cultural events on the IU campus and elsewhere.

The Center and its staff spent much of the early part of fall semester completing a complicated and time-consuming move from its Goodbody offices to new accommodations in the just-completed building for the School of Global and International Studies. In the process we joined all of the other Title VI Centers and related international departments to create a centralized site for IU’s grand initiative to expand international programming in both Bloomington and abroad.

As many of our readers will know, the nation’s Title VI Centers were recently the target of sharp cuts. The long-standing congressional mandates supporting international area studies took a notable hit in the last Federal budget, as did federal funding as a whole for language and cultural studies as critical national projects...

Ben Priest is a graduate student working on Kurdistan and Kurdish nationalism. He is currently in Erbil, Iraq, where there has been unrest as a result of a referendum on independence, conducting dissertation research. The following is a brief summary of his experiences to date.

In addition to in-person outreach and education, the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center also delivers content via video conference. I find myself having taken on responsibility for handling these video conferences this year and feel it appropriate to say a few words about the experience. Initially, I felt a little like I had just jumped into the deep end of a pool to try to figure out how to swim, but the process has gotten much easier the more that I do it.